AJC > Sports > Braves > Blog > Archives > 2008 > August > 04
Monday, August 4, 2008
We’ll miss Skip something fierce
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There’s a gaping hole in Braves Nation today, a collective sadness as we reflect upon and mourn the passing of the inimitable Skip Caray.
I didn’t get to cover the Braves when Ted Turner owned the team, and regret that whenever I hear the many stories about the colorful, boisterous billionaire Mouth of the South.
But I did get to spend more than six years on the beat while Skip Caray was in the broadcast booth. My life is a hell of a lot richer for it.
This was an original, folks, and that’s a huge understatement.
Skip was in the pantheon of great baseball broadcasters, in my book. That he didn’t get selected to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown while alive is a shame. If he doesn’t get elected soon it’ll be a complete injustice. Yes, he was that good, that impactful, that important. No doubt.
Of course, if I said that to Skip he’d probably just respond with some profanity-laced line about not wanting to be a member of any club that would have him. Only he’d come up with his own unique way to express that sentiment, rather than simply paraphrase that line like so many of us others would.
Because you’ve got to understand, Skip said original things, brilliant things, off the top of his head that most of us would commit to memory and repeat to others. Lines that we never forget, that made us smile or laugh or shake our head in wonder that he had the cajones to say that on the air.
God, I’m gonna miss him.
There were a few times I sat with him exchanging stories about our hell-raising days and damage wrought, physical and otherwise. He had a lot more of those stories than I did, more interesting ones, over a far longer period.
I’d walk into the clubhouse or dugout before a game, and he’d have a sharp barb about the shirt or shoes I was wearing. Meanwhile he’s sitting there in some loud, flowing Hawaiian shirt that one of his kids or his wife bought him.
He’d bet me $50 that his Mizzou Tigers would beat my Kansas Jayhawks in a football game. And when KU won, he’d come into the writers’ section of the pressbox with a $50 bill stuck to his forehead and make me take it, after making a comment about a prostitute that I can’t write here.
When the Braves looked awful, Skip would say it — he’d spare no words in his brutal assessment of the team to others of us who covered it, and on the air he’d make his point with acerbic humor, rather than express some phony, rose-colored lens view that no one would’ve bought anyway.
The thing is, Skip’s witticisms and criticisms during a five-game losing skid, with the team down 6-1 in the sixth inning, were often so entertaining that you’d keep the radio on just to be entertained. When he did radio, if the TV broadcast wasn’t delayed by too many seconds, I’d turn down the TV sound and listen to Skip’s call on the radio.
He was the perfect partner to Pete Van Wieren. Pete, the smooth-voiced professional armed with statistics, a razor-sharp memory and perspective. Skip, the distinctive-voiced announcer with … well, everything he brought to the booth.
The two of them spent so many a night in years past at the hotel bar or a steakhouse, often entertaining a fortunate table full of folks who knew at the end of the night it was one they’d never forget.
I’m thinking about how, if there was a way to have recordings of those conversations now, it would be as illuminating — and far more entertaining — than spending the day at Cooperstown, believe me. (Of course, you’d need someone to spend a lot of time editing the taps to make them suitable for the kids.)
I remember being in high school and college in the late 70s’ and early ‘80s, and getting two teams’ games on cable TV - the Cubs, with the great Harry Caray bellowing in the booth, and the Braves, with son Skip Caray and his splendid partners. I used to think, how cool that Caray household must have been.
Chip Caray indicates it was everything I’d imagined. And more.
When some of us wondered the last couple of years if Chip might have regretted not staying with the Cubs instead of jumping to TBS a few years back, we were forgetting he did it in large part because he wanted to work with his dad.
Chip knew he wouldn’t be here forever. Chip was smart. He got to spend more time with his pops in last few years than a lot of us have spent with our dads in the past two decades.
When I heard last night, in my hotel room here in San Francisco, that Skip had died, a lump formed in my throat and my eyes got a little damp. I had just spent a half-hour talking on the phone to my mom, who lives in Wilson, N.C. She and my dad had spent the weekend at Emerald Isle, N.C., and she was telling me every little mundane detail about the experience and about my cousins who were there, etc.
Being caught up in my own experiences out here, I didn’t listen as closely as I should have. I rarely do. I’m an idiot for that.
But dad wasn’t in the house when I called her. He was out running some errands. Later, after hearing of Skip’s passing, I realized that I hadn’t talked to my dad for more than a few minutes in quite a while. Stupid.
I’ve got to do better than that. A lot of us do. We don’t get to spend hours at a time sitting next to our dad at work, like Chip and Skip did the past few years.
My dad had triple-bypass surgery a few years back, and he’s still not eating right or doing all he should do to take care of himself. He’s a lot like Skip in his gregariousness and ability to light up a room with a joke, often one unfit for mixed audiences. I really wish my dad had met Skip. They’d have hit it off.
I really need to spend more time with my dad, and am going to regret I haven’t. Chip, I don’t have to tell you how wise you were to come “home,” so to speak, and how fortunate you were, in so many ways.
Skip cared more about others than most people who never met him could ever imagine. They hear that cynical tone, that sardonic wit, that dripping sarcasm, and they assume he was a rude SOB. No, the man just didn’t suffer fools.
And he wasn’t phony. Nothing about him was.
You knew where you stood with him, and you knew how he felt about the team, about baseball and about the corporations and networks that have pumped so much money into the game and hijacked it, for all intents and purposes. They arrogantly believe they can make whatever changes, subtle or otherwise, they see fit to make to further their own interests. They believe that because they can.
Skip hated a lot of that stuff. But he loved the game. Man, how he loved it.
When I started covering the Braves in 2002, he and Pete were bigger stars than anyone on the team other than perhaps Chipper Jones and Greg Maddux. Sometimes when I’d stay in the team hotel, I’d see the team bus arrive or depart, and note the dozens of fans who’d crowd around Skip and Pete for autographs.
People around the country and beyond had seen and heard them do the games for decades on TBS when The Superstation beamed the games off satellites to million and millions of homes that didn’t get nightly broadcasts of any other teams.
But exposure alone didn’t account for that popularity. Greatness did.
Skip was great.
Damn, I’m gonna miss him.
Gonna miss listening to the broadcast on radio as I mowed my lawn on days off back in Atlanta. I think of the times when I’ve been pushing the mower, smoking a cigar, earbud things on, and stopped while laughing out loud at a comment by Skip.
It happened just this summer when the Braves were beating up on Dusty Baker’s Cincinnati Reds, and Skip said, if I remember correctly, “The bases are loaded, and Dusty Baker wishes he was.” He said that on the air? Yes, he did.
We’re gonna miss Skip. We’re gonna miss him something fierce.
The venerable broadcaster, who lived life to the absolute fullest, died Sunday in his sleep.
Rest in peace.
“SUNDAY MORNING COMING DOWN” by Kris Kristofferson
Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
An’ I shaved my face and combed my hair,
An’ stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.
I’d smoked my brain the night before,
On cigarettes and songs I’d been pickin’.
But I lit my first and watched a small kid,
Cussin’ at a can that he was kicking.
Then I crossed the empty street,
‘n caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin’ chicken.
And it took me back to somethin’,
That I’d lost somehow, somewhere along the way.
On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
‘Cos there’s something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there’s nothin’ short of dyin’,
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin’ city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin’ comin’ down.
In the park I saw a daddy,
With a laughin’ little girl who he was swingin’.
And I stopped beside a Sunday school,
And listened to the song they were singin’.
Then I headed back for home,
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin’.
And it echoed through the canyons,
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.
On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
‘Cos there’s something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there’s nothin’ short of dyin’,
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin’ city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin’ comin’ down.
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